An Automatic Cat Feeder Built With A 4060 Binary Counter

September 6, 2024 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

We’ve seen a great many cat feeders over the years. Some rely on the Internet of Things, and some rely on fancy microcontrollers. [Larry Cook], on the other hand, built his using a simple 4060 binary counter chip.

The feeder is built out of old plywood, and the whole thing runs off an old 12-volt DC wall wart and a lead-acid battery to keep it going in a power outage. The dry cat food is stored in hopper above a drum, with the drum rotated by a 12-volt DC gearmotor. The gearmotor is activated on a schedule—either every 4 hours, or every 5.5 hours, depending on setting. There’s then a four-digit 7-segment display for counting the total number of feedings.

The manner of operation is simple. The 4060 binary counter slowly counts up to 8,196 on a 1.11 Hz or 0.83 Hz clock, for four hour or 5.5 hour operation respectively. When it hits that threshold, it fires the gear motor. The gear motor then rotates the drum for one revolution, dumping a preset amount of food. At the end of a revolution, it triggers a hall sensor which resets the circuit.

The best thing about this design? It’s been in service for ten years. [Larry’s] original video is a big contrast to his latest one, but it shows the same feeder doing the same job, all this time.

We love a good cat feeder, and it’s great to see one built with simple old-school parts, too. Video after the break.

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A cat sits on a dark green mid-century modern bench next to a cat-sized black piano. A black bowl sits beneath the piano to catch food. An abstract green, blue, and tan picture in a black frame is on the wall above the cat and a black bar stool can be seen around the corner. It looks like the sort of photo you'd see on Instagram or in an interior design magazine.

Piano Feeder Gets Pets Playing For Their Supper

February 29, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 21 Comments

If you ever watched a video of Piano Cat and wondered if your cat could learn to play, then [Sebastian Sokołowski] has a possible solution with this combination piano tutor and cat feeder.

Starting with a CNC cut MDF enclosure, [Sokołowski] developed a cat feeder that would fit in the rear of the piano. It had to be reliable, consistent, and easy to disassemble. He walks us through his testing for each of these features and says the feeder was the most difficult part of the project to develop due to the propensity of pet feeder mechanisms to jam.

A custom PCB takes the key presses from the piano (with functional black keys) and outputs the sound from a speaker in the back. Lessons progress through increasing difficulty automatically, encouraging your cat to learn what the different keys can do. Food is dispensed after a performance or on a schedule set through the accompanying smartphone app. All the files are available if you want to build your own, but there is a wait list available if you want a completed version to give to less technically-inclined cat staff.

We’re certainly no stranger to the creatures that rule the internet here at Hackaday, having featured other cat feeders, new research into spaying cats, or even open source robo-cats.

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Hacking Developers With A Cat Feeder: Who’s A Good Kitty?

October 12, 2022 by Maya Posch 4 Comments

Most of us probably know the drudgery of getting through some coding work, with just tedious hours of monkeying around stretching ahead of us. What if this tedium were to be interrupted by an occasional reward when we did something productive, like pushing a commit or other measure of progress? That’s roughly the concept that [John Partee] started off with when his gaze fell upon one of those automated cat feeders. Cat or developer, who doesn’t like to hear the tinkle of a tasty treat falling into their bowl?

The target pet feeder is a PetKit Fresh Element Solo, which allows for objects with a size of 12×12 mm (any orientation) to be fed through the feeding mechanism. Fortunately [John]’s favorite dark chocolate-covered almonds treat fit these requirements, and he set to work to figure out the REST API call needed to trigger a manual feeding event on the cat feeder device, employing the existing PyPetKit Python library that does the heavy lifting of connecting to and communicating with PetKit’s servers, as the feeder is of course an IoT device.

This means that the event flow still depends on PetKit’s “cloud”, which may inspire some enterprising hackers to make a stand-alone version, the development of which may be assisted by [John]’s solution through a regular treat. Before taking such a solution into use, be sure to discuss it with any pets you have, as they may not quite comprehend why there’s no reward for them whenever the *tinkle* sound occurs.

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An orange and white cat eats from a bowl with a hinged cover. The cat and the bowl are on top of an MDF platform.

Load Cells To Get The Right Pet The Right Food

September 18, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 11 Comments

If you have more than one pet, you may know how hard it is to tell how much each furry friend is eating. If you introduce prescription foods, then this minor annoyance can have a major impact on your pet’s health. Facing this dilemma, [tomasdiazwahl] set out to make a pet feeder that feeds his pets exactly what they need when they approach the feeder.

Using the ever-popular Arduino Uno, the feeder is connected to a platform that uses load cells to detect the pet’s weight. The weight data is then used to identify which animal is looking for food. Once the pet is identified, the correct food bowl opens. It seems this prototype only has one food chamber to keep unauthorized pets from eating the special food, but the basic idea should be extensible to two or more chambers. While some existing solutions read the pet’s microchip or NFC collars to determine who’s at the feeder, [tomasdiazwahl] decided against these given the fickleness of trying to reliably get a reader at the correct position relative to the pet. As long as you don’t have multiple pets with the same weight, it should work just fine.

This project has a nice mix of woodworking, 3D printing, and electronics showing what can be accomplished when you aren’t afraid to mix techniques. We also really appreciate that [Tomasdiazwahl] spent the extra time to include a testing procedure and safety mechanism into the project. Designing a device to improve your pet’s health shouldn’t come with a safety risk!

This isn’t the first cat feeder we’ve covered that uses weight to tell the difference between the pets, and if you want a simpler project to start with, check out this Simple Auger Pet Feeder.

Smart Pet Feeder Is Well Engineered

April 19, 2021 by Anool Mahidharia 19 Comments

Having pets can sometimes be more demanding than raising kids. Pet owners obviously love and adore their pets, but anything that can be done to reduce their “chores” can be a welcome relief. One big pain point is feeding them at the right time and in the right amount, especially when it comes to cats. As the saying goes, “Dogs have Masters, Cats have Staff! ”

[Sebastian] had had it with his cat [Strachu] nagging him at odd hours for food. Luckily, [Sebastian] is a skilled maker, and his IoT Cat Feeder is not only practical, but also extremely well engineered. He designed and built it from scratch, and the beautiful, final version shows the effort he put in to it. His requirements were quite straightforward. It had to integrate with his home automation system, had to dispense food based on a regular schedule, send him a notification at other times of the day when the feeder detected the cat so he could decide if the cat deserved a special treat or not, and allow him to manually dispense cat food. Finally, he also wanted it to be easy to take apart so he could wash the parts that are in contact with food.

For the electronics, [Sebastian] designed a custom board to hold the ESP12F module and all the other associated parts. Everything, other than the stepper motor is mounted on the PCB. A PIR sensor is used for cat detection. A piezo buzzer lets the cat know that food is ready. A push button can be used to manually dispense food when required. The ESP8266 is flashed with ESPhome which allows control via simple yet powerful configuration files and control them remotely through the Home Assistant addon. If you’re interested in taking a look under the hood, [Sebastian] walks through some of the key code blocks on the ESP side, as well as the various configuration and setting options for the Home Assistant.

But by far the most effort he needed was in getting the mechanical design perfected. He had to go through several rounds of prototype iterations – after all, his cat deserved the very best in feeder design. The basic parts of the design are simple – a stepper motor drives an auger that pushes the cat food from the main container and deposits it in the bowl. Check out the detailed assembly instructions and pictures on his blog. The best part of his design is how easy it is to take it apart the feeder for cleaning. The stepper motor is held in place by a snap fit end piece without using any screws. The main body then just slides out from the top of the electronics box. Check out [Sebastian]’s cat feeder video after the break for details.

If this design makes you hanker to make one for your cat too, head over to his blog post and provide your mail address and [Sebastian] will send all the files for the project.

If your cat isn’t satisfied with dry food nuggets, you probably ought to build this Automated Cat Feeder That Handles Wet Food With Aplomb.

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Piston-Powered Pellet Pusher For Peckish Pets

May 14, 2020 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

We all have our new and interesting challenges in lockdown life. If you’ve had to relocate to ride it out, the chances are good that even your challenges have challenges. Lockdown left [Kanoah]’s sister in the lurch when it came to feeding her recently-adopted pet rat, so he came up with a temporary solution to ensure that the rat never misses a meal.

Most of the automated pet feeders we see around here use an auger to move the food. That’s all fine and good, but if you just need to move a singular mass, the screw seems like overkill. [Kanoah]’s feeder is more akin to a pellet-pushing piston. It runs on a Metro Mini, but an Arduino Nano or anything with enough I/O pins would work just fine. The microcontroller starts counting the hours as soon as it has power, and delivers pellets four times a day with a servo-driven piston arm. [Kanoah] has all the files up on Thingiverse if you need a similar solution.

There many ways of solving the problem of dry pet food delivery. Wet food is a completely different animal, but as it turns out, not impossible to automate.

A Simple Auger Pet Feeder

January 17, 2020 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

Pet feeders are a popular maker project. One can speculate that this shows the great self-confidence common to the maker set, who are willing to trust their own work to keep their animal companions alive for many days at a a time. [Darren Tarbard] is one such maker, who put together this simple auger build.

The project consists of a hopper for dry pet food, into which a screw auger is inserted. Both parts are 3D printed, making them easy to produce at home for the average maker. The build was designed specifically around the parts [Darren] had to hand, namely a 28BYJ-48 stepper motor, which is charged with turning the auger. Running the show is an Arduino, which can be run with whatever suitable timing code is necessary to feed the particular pet in question. There’s also a remixed version that adds a larger food storage dish on top for longer periods of unattended operation, created by [szuchid].

It’s a basic build, but one that would be readily achievable by most makers with little more than some junkbox components and a roll of filament. Of course, if your pet prefers wet food, you might need a different design. Video after the break.

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